School group should open its books to critics

SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS consider the attempts by public school critics to rifle through their records a form of legal harassment. And they’re right. It’s reminiscent of the fishing expeditions the state Democratic Party launched against the Beasley and Sanford administrations, and the Republican Party did against the Hodges administration.

They say the S.C. Association of School Administrators should not have to comply with a wide-ranging Freedom of Information request from the president of voucher lobbying group SCRG. Here they’re wrong.

Even if the legal issues might be murky, the moral and political issues are clear: An organization that consists of people who work in and support public education should be falling all over itself to be open and transparent, to make it clear that it is working in the public interest and has nothing to hide. Especially when the people seeking information are themselves so secretive, and are working around the clock to undermine public trust in our schools.

For the association to do otherwise, for it to fight to keep its books closed, is to hand a propaganda weapon to people who are waging guerrilla warfare against the very notion of public education.

It might be a close call as to whether the school administrators group meets the Freedom of Information Act’s legal definition of a “public body,” although we think there’s a strong case that it does.

The statute says any organization that receives “public funds” must comply with the law. That obviously doesn’t apply to the business that sells gasoline to run the state’s school buses; it probably doesn’t apply to the local chamber of commerce when a school district agrees to pay for its superintendent’s membership. And much of the public funding the association receives is of a piece with those expenditures. But the association also receives public benefits — that is, indirect public funding — that businesses that contract with the state don’t receive: membership for its employees in the State Retirement System, at the same taxpayer-subsidized rate as state employees; membership in the State Health Plan, although without the subsidy.

That all makes for an important legal question, which has implications for the S.C. School Boards Association, the Association of Counties, the Municipal Association and, we’re sure, other groups we’re not thinking of at the moment whose membership is made up entirely of public officials, who join because they are public officials, and which receive public funds, if only for membership dues.

Of course, we’d argue that all of those groups ought to act like public bodies as well, no matter what a court might say. Like the school administrators association, their purpose is to advance what their (public official) members consider the public good, and to do that both collectively and in their individual roles as public employees and officials.

Is it a little more difficult to do business in the bright glare of sunlight? Probably so, particularly when that business involves strategic political calculations. But the primary reason that our government requires itself to do business in the open applies no less to these quasi-public entities: That openness is vital to public trust. If they hope to have the public trust that is an essential pre-condition to winning legislative support for their efforts, they must be as Caesar’s wife.